


What comes next?

by Bittereloquence



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Clone Lives Suck, Emetophobia, Forgiveness?, Gen, No Beta We Die Like Clones, Post-Order 66
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-27
Updated: 2020-08-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:35:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26124331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bittereloquence/pseuds/Bittereloquence
Summary: A Jedi and a clone commander, two men broken by lost love and grief try to find forgiveness in a universe where such things are hard to find.
Relationships: Asajj Ventress/Quinlan Vos, CC-5052 | Bly & Quinlan Vos, CC-5052 | Bly/Aayla Secura
Comments: 6
Kudos: 32
Collections: Star Wars Fanfiction Discord





	What comes next?

**Author's Note:**

> This is my love note to the Blyla peeps. I adore this pairing and find it's inherent tragedy so fascinating. I debated what Vos would do if he ever came across Bly, if he would epitomize the Jedi ideals even after losing everything and find it in himself to forgive or if he would strike out at the man who killed his padawan and well, I guess this fic speaks for itself on where I fell on that scale. I wrote this on my tablet while my laptop was being repaired and did my best to proof read it but I kid you not, it kept auto-correcting Quinlan to Quinoa and Bly to Boy which tickles me beyond words so if I missed something, please forgive me.

Bly woke up groggy and confused, like he'd just spent the past week on a bender and now every part of his body was rebelling against him. His head felt like it was full of cotton, his stomach felt queasy while something had crawled into his mouth and died.

Slowly, his muzzy head cleared enough for him to recognize the sharp, astringent smell of cleaning supplies and the bland whiteness of the room brought to mind a dozen different medical bays. Bly slowly adjusted his previous assumption...had he been injured? The heaviness he felt in his limbs and fuzzy feeling in his head could have easily been caused by some strong pain medication though he didn't recall getting hurt.

"Finally awake, Commander?" The voice that spoke from Bly's right side was unfamiliar and he had a strange wash of deja vu and his brain automatically tried to supply his name was CC-5052 not Bly but no...That wasn't right. He hadn't gone by his clone tag for years.

Aayla had adamantly refused to treat her men like they were simply numbers or standard issued GAR equipment. It had been one of the first things he'd noticed and admired in Aayla. 

All of his uncertainties about whether or not he would mean well with his new Jedi general had been firmly placed to rest within five minutes of meeting her.

Something niggles at the back of Bly's brain like a sore tooth, just nagging enough to distract him and his drug addled thoughts. 

"Commander?" That voice again, now that he heard it, Bly recognized it as one that was sort of familiar though he could not place it exactly so Bly forced his head to turn on a neck that felt like rubber and he stared at the Kiffar man sitting at his bedside with incomprehension for a moment.

"General Vos?" Jedi. His brain supplied.

_Jedi_

Something screamed inside of him. 

And directly following that realization, Bly's memories came crashing down around him. He remembered the shadowed figure of Darth Sidious speaking to him, telling him to Execute Order 66.

Memories swamped him like an unwelcome tsunami. Him and the rest of his squad brought up their blasters to bear on Aayla. Of pulling the trigger because suddenly his brain was telling him the woman he loves was a traitor and had to be killed.

He didn't understand it. One moment he'd been cursing himself for being so distracted watching Aayla gracefully make her way through the fairyland like undergrowth of the forest in Felucia and the next, he and his men were firing on her from behind like filthy _hut'tuun_ convinced she'd been trying to poison the local water table.

Bly sat up too quickly with a hoarse sounding pain, his hands clutched at his skull as if he could somehow make sense of what was going on. "Aayla! Stars, what did we do?!"

They'd shot her in the back like honorless cowards and Bly's already unsteady stomach objected to just sudden jerking upright and he lost his battle with the queasiness. He ended up throwing up the meager contents of his stomach all over the floor and as if things were bad enough, some of it very nearly ended up on Quinlan Vos's boot.

"Kriff!" Belatedly, Vos grabbed an empty container and thrust it at Bly. The clone clumsily fumbled for the bright pink plastoid container and their fingers ended up colliding in the hand off.

That was pretty much the very last thing Quinlan wanted to happen. He normally had a strong enough hold on his shielding and could avoid picking up latent psychic impressions from inanimate objects or people but right now, his vaulted self-control was in tatters. 

Everything he knew and loved had been ripped away from him starting with Ventress followed by all of his friends and then his beloved padawan whom he'd loved as if she were his own flesh and blood. 

She'd been gunned down by this wreck of a clone currently hunched over the side of the bed puking his guts out and thanks to that simple brush of bare skin and Quinlan's already shaky control on his mental shielding he caught flashes of the horrified clone's memories.

He saw Bly and his squad mates gun Aayla down, felt the man's horrified realization of just what he had done mingled with the confused disbelief and the cognitive dissonance of knowing the kind of person Aayla was warring with the inexorable control of the bio-chip that had been implanted in his brain. 

The chip which had activated and overwritten the man known as Bly and replaced him with the most basic version of himself, a barely sentient meat droid who had no fond memories or love for Aayla Secura. Instead, she had been a traitor, a monster that had to be stopped before she murdered thousands by poisoning the local water table.

Quinlan Vos had fallen to the Dark side, had allowed his emotions to overcome his common sense and he'd become Dooku's pawn but even in his darkest moments, Vos had still remembered who he was.

He'd been warned the clones sudden defection and treachery had been the result of the bio-chips taking control of the clone army across the entire GAR. Palpatine's finest moment of his near unchallenged coup d'état but there had been a part of Quinlan that had still doubted that truth until that moment.

A part of him desperately wanted to hate the man sitting in front of him, wanted to strike out in anger for what he had done to Aayla but he couldn't.

Both because he'd promised himself that he would never sink down to those dark depths again, had made a promise over Asajj's grave he wouldn't fall again. But also because he realized Bly was just as much of a victim as Aayla had been and it cemented his resolve for this insane mission he'd set himself out on.

Vos couldn't contain his flinch or the way he jerked away so sharply he ended up knocking the chair he'd been seated in over. The Kiffar Jedi immediately started to try and re-center himself.

Bly had nothing left in his stomach left to throw up and was now struggling with awful, cramping dry heaves. It had to be whatever painkillers they'd given him, he'd felt the bandage taped over an aching sore spot in his skull and he dully wondered just what Quinlan Vos had done to him.

Or better yet, why he hadn't put a dang blaster-bolt through him for what he'd done to Aayla. It would have been completely justified and right now, Bly found himself wishing he had. 

"I killed her."

A series of swift, complicated expressions quickly flit across the dark-skinned Jedi's face before Quinlan Vos sank down to his knees in a meditative pose with a long, shaky sounding exhalation. "Yes, you did."

Bly shot him an unfriendly look and placed the mostly empty container down on a tray. "Why the hell am I even alive then? You should have shot me. Or is this you trying and failing?" 

It didn't feel like a blaster wound, he'd had plenty of those over the years.

"I thought about it, I really did but then I remembered Aayla wouldn't have wanted that." Vos said bluntly as his eyes drifted closed. "She loved you, and you weren't in control of your actions. There was a chip implanted in your brain. It was in all of the clones' brains, it was supposed to inhibit your aggression."

The clone commander scoffed quietly. "That turned out well."

Vos just cracked open one eye to pin the bitter-looking clone with an unamused look. "Are you done?"

Bly had the good grace to look abashed and he dropped his gaze. 

"As I was saying, this so-called inhibitor chip was placed in all the clones but it has a secondary function, one none of us knew about. It seems to have been contingent on some kind of code word and once active, all the clones turned on the Jedi. My own commander tried and failed at trying to kill me but for the most part, the clones succeeded in executing their orders."

"Order 66," Bly whispered more to himself than to Vos. "It came in over a secured channel, not like any one I'd seen before. It came from the High Chancellor himself, General Vos."

"Are you sure of that, Bly?" That information had both of the Jedi's eyes snapping open. "It makes sense with what has happened since then. What do you remember?"

"I don't...it's kind of, I don't know how to describe it?"

"Like you are viewing the situation but it's like you're not actually there? Like you're watching someone else's memories?" 

"Sort of like that, yes."

"Disassociation, that would make sense as well." He experienced something very similar whenever he used his psychometry.

"Is that why it felt so weird to hear you call me Bly and not my clone tag? What? Did they just reformat us like kriffing clankers?" Bly wasn't the type of clone who blew his stack easily. He generally kept his emotions under control and focused on the mission with laser-like focus. 

But he found himself unexpectedly angry at this situation though he found it almost impossible to pinpoint who he was angry with: himself, Palpatine, the Jedi? Or just the universe at large, all felt like acceptable targets for his anger right now.

"In essence, which is the reason I got you out. Aayla would never have stood for it, you and the rest of the clones being little more than slaves. Meat droids for Palpatine's ambitions." 

"Why me?" 

Quinlan gifted him with another thoroughly impressed look as though he could not believe how dense the other man was being. "Because Aayla loved you and said you were a good man." When Bly's expression shuttered into a blank mask, Vos held up one hand as though to forestall him. "And please do not insult my intelligence by trotting out whatever lie you think I want to hear. I know-" Quinlan broke off abruptly with a pained look and for a moment, he looked as broken and devastated as he felt.

"I knew my padawan better than that. And I am not a Jedi who has any right to preach about attachments so just...don't. She deserves better than that and your relationship is not some shameful secret that deserves to be hidden away." Quinlan stated brusquely and the clone actually flinched at his pitiless words. 

Bly's eyes started to burn and he clenched them closed as he visibly tried to compose himself lest he embarrass himself further. "No one else will see it like that."

"That's their problem, not yours. Besides, I think the universe has moved beyond caring what a clone commander and a Jedi got up to behind closed doors. The GAR and the Republic are gone, as is the Jedi order. Only you can tell the tale of your relationship with Aayla because I guarantee the Empire is going to do their damnedest to smear her name along with the rest of the Jedi."

If Bly had been a different person, if he'd met Quinlan Vos more than a handful of times and they had any real relationship beyond sharing the mutual orbit of a dead woman, he might have pointed out Vos probably would have had the right to some form of opinion in regards to his relationship with Aayla. But they didn't have that sort of relationship and if he were honest with himself, he couldn't find it within himself to gove a damn what Quinlan Vos or anyone else thought anymore.

"So what now? Am I supposed to thank you for yanking that chip out of my head and leaving me with the knowledge I killed the woman I loved?" Despite the bitterness and venom that burned on his tongue, it felt strangely freeing to actually say those words out loud to anyone else but Aayla. It had been their own private secret for so long.

"It wouldn't hurt. And if you want to sit there in that bed and feel sorry for yourself, that's your prerogative. I'd say you have a day or two of moping due to you but if you want to get off your ass and do something useful, there's plenty of things to do. More of your brothers to save at the very least. I had enough trouble taking you down on my own. They obviously put extra helpings of stubbornness in your clones genetic code or something."

That had Bly's head snap up and his all too sharp gaze pinned Quinlan down with almost uncomfortable intensity. "You aim to free more _vode_?" He felt emotion seize in his chest and he could barely breathe through the hard grip around his heart. Like all clones, Bly felt most in his element when he had a clear objective in mind and saving as many of his men and brothers as he could from the Empire sounded like a fine mission to him.

"Its tantamount to slavery, I can't think of a better way to honor Aayla's memory than to free as many of her men as I can."

"...and you think you can bring yourself to work with me? Even after what I've done?"

"Depends, you think you can find a way of living with yourself? Because if you're going to spend the whole time feeling sorry for yourself then I really might shoot you."

"Let me get back to you about that, General Vos." There was the barest hint of something that might have been irony in Bly's tone and Vos found himself biting back an amused huff.

"You have some time. Meddroid said you should rest a couple of day anyway. What, with them performing brain surgery and all."

"I should be ship-shape by tomorrow, we clones heal up fast."

"Like I said, an over-abundance of stubbornness. If we are going to work together, you're going to have to drop the whole general thing. I'm not a kriffing general anymore and I suppose I should probably get serious about going undercover from here on out. The Empire thinks I'm dead, I should probably not spoil that surprise just yet."

"What am I supposed to call you then?" 

"I'll get back to you about that. Rest up for now, we'll touch base in the morning." There was a flash of the old Quinlan Vos in that playful quip he parroted Bly's previous words back at him. He didn't know if he would ever get back to the person he'd been. There was so much loss and sorrow clouding his heart at the moment it felt like an impossibility. 

Vos climbed gracefully to his feet and turned to leave.

"Does the pain ever go away? You were able to move on after...after you lost Ventress." It felt almost like a betrayal to every brother who had died at Asajj Ventress's hand to even say her name out loud but Bly desperately wanted to know if this drowning sorrow would ever become manageable. He wasn't a stranger to loss, had lost plenty of friends and brothers in the war but this pain was something different and too sharp. 

"It doesn't go away but time does dull it somewhat. She'll still be the first thing you think about when you first wake up and the last thing you'll think of before you go to sleep but eventually you'll be able to think about her and it won't feel like someone is stabbing you in the heart with a vibroblade. Or at least that's the bantha podoo people like to claim." Vos said quietly as he paused in the doorway. "I'll let you know if I ever reach that day." 

And with that, the Jedi slipped out the door and left Bly alone in his lonely hospital bed with just his thoughts and a heart that felt like it was shattered into a million pieces.

The clone commander wasn't sure if this existence was preferable to the cold mercy of death. A part of him longed for that because then it wouldn't hurt anymore. But a larger part of him knew Quinlan Vos was right, Aayla would have wanted him to keep on living. 

In a way, he felt almost like he was obligated to keep on living for the both of them. 

Bly wasn't a religious man, didn't really hold to the Mandalorian ideals some of the _vod_ clung to so desperately. But Aayla had believed in the Force and that all beings that died simply returned to the Force. They weren't gone, simply transformed into something different. 

He didn't know if he believed that anymore than he believed in the _Manda_ but Bly found the idea that there might still be some part of Aayla out there, near at hand even if she was unknowable was comforting in its own strange way.

Maybe one day he would ask Vos about it.

Assuming they didn't kill each other first.

**Author's Note:**

> You can blame canon for giving us just the vaguest of ideas of what happened to Quinlan Vos which pretty much boils down to Disney going ehhhhhhhhhhh? He's alive? And if I want to picture him and a rehabilitated Bly making it their mission to free as many _vode_ from the bio-chips then Disney can pry it from my cold dead hands or actually nut up and give us some concrete canon on what happens to these two. :P
> 
> As always, I am over on [ tumblr](https://bylightofdawn.tumblr.com) and love screaming about Star Wars and other fannish ridiculous. And cats, you can't forget the cats.


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